Thoughts Off de Waal

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Although Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape was published half a decade ago, the monograph remains terribly relevant. I gave some primary impressions of the book last week, but one section has remained firmly in my head and has mingled with all the harsh rhetoric in the news about health care reform in the United States. Asking the question of whether Homo sapiens are still evolving biologically, de Waal withholds his final opinion on the matter, but he points out that statistics indicate Americans are falling behind much of the rest of the developed world in terms of general health. This he ascribes to the competition inherent in a free market economy that favors the best health care only to the wealthy while the average citizen is offered substandard options. The numbers bear him out on this – he notes that on the standards utilized to measure general health, the United States is not even in the top 25 industrial nations.

With the conviction of a true prophet, de Waal notes that privatization of health care has led to a precarious imbalance in medical care in the United States, where the top 1 percent of citizens has more income to spend than the bottom 40 percent combined. This, he believes, is because we have lost sight of the altruism inherent in apedom. Although the great apes are endangered (ironically, by their overly greedy genetic cousins) their societies show no such disparity. An ape family will assist a weakened or feeble member and give it extra care to ensure that it is offered a life as comfortable as possible. They do not discard the fragile and “expendable” members. Republicans, however, wave placards trying to shout down basic health coverage for the poor.

Does biological evolution continue among the human species? Have we stopped natural selection’s eternally ticking clock? Only time will tell. It does seem, however, that the very Bible pounded by the Religious Right (health care reform’s greatest opponent) would argue that the apes got it right. We should care for the poor, disadvantaged, and underrepresented. While the Tea Party belles are busy trying to rewrite history with America founded as a Christian nation they daintily wipe their mouths on the pages of the very book they treasure so deeply and claim as their authentic heritage.

Ape Versus Primate

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I have just finished reading one of the most important books I’ve found in quite some time: Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape. My attention was first drawn to the author when Rutgers University sponsored a talk he gave in the fall that I was unfortunately unable to attend. Simultaneously I saw his book footnoted in a text I was reading and decided to follow up on it. In addition to containing fascinating, documented anecdotes concerning ape behavior (he tells of a bonobo that attempted to help an injured bird fly!) de Waal holds a mirror up to the great apes and sees humanity reflected back. His discussion of the origins of morality makes far more sense to me than any theory I’ve seen a professional ethicist concoct. Our sense of empathy, de Waal notes with considerable evidence, derives from our common ancestor with the apes.

After discussing the understudied trait of kindness in the apes, de Waal writes: “With morality firmly rooted in sentiment it’s easy to agree with Darwin and Westermarck on its evolution and to disagree with those who think culture and religion contain the answer. Modern religions are only a few thousand years old. It’s hard to imagine that human psychology was radically different before religions arose. It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality clearly predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply these tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in the works since time immemorial” (225).

These might just be platitudes if ample evidence did not demonstrate their veracity. Apes plan ahead, recognize fairness, and can even see issues from the point of view of others (something Gorgias Press might benefit from learning). They are clearly inheritors of the moral sense that evolution has crafted among all cooperative animals over the eons. Religions like to lay claim to the origins of morality: we behave this way because our god told us to. In a sense that may be true, but only if the “god” is nature itself and the instruction it gives is the way for a species to thrive. Caring for one another, all religions aside, is the formula that evolution presents as the most successful choice of natural selection.

Dinosaur Ark

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Over the weekend I had a detailed comment left on my post about the discovery of Aardonyx celestae, found here. Since the comment is a lengthy rebuttal, my answer begged to become a post of its own, so I present it here. The first remark I have to make is that my commenter wrongly suggested two problematic assumptions: I “don’t care” about correctly representing Creationist viewpoints and that I “ridicule Christians.” For those many students who have taken my classes over the past 17 years, it is always clear that I respect all religious viewpoints; in fact, empathy is generally cited as one of my main characteristics. I vehemently defend the rights of individuals to believe the religion they believe to be right – e.g., I do care. As for the ridiculing Christians concern, I ridicule no person. I will, however, point out viewpoints that are ridiculous, “Creation Science” being one of the most obvious. As is clear to anyone who takes the time to survey Christianity, the large majority of Christians in the world have no problems with evolution. A small but vocal sub-sect of the religion, mainly based in America, is the main Christian group that supports Creationism.

My theological assailant tells me that the Hebrew word for “kind” in the Noachian account is “min” (the root, marked as “dubious” in the standard lexicon, is myn) and that it is “much broader” than the word translated “species.” The problem here is that the ancient Semitic viewpoint has been left unaddressed. For the ancient Israelite dog was dog and wolf was wolf, and ne’er would the twain meet. Arguing that a limited evolution has taken place in order to make room on the ark is a fatal flaw to the position. Once it has been admitted that the Noah story is not literally each and every species known, it is the equivalent to the ark springing a leak mid-deluge. The commenter’s examples of animals breeding only “within their kinds” is also problematic. Such “kinds” are not recognized by “nature” and numerous examples of viable offspring crossing species have been recorded. Nature simply doesn’t abide by the neat and tidy categories that the ancient Israelites recognized. Suggesting that two sauropods were all that was needed on the ark to produce everything from Titanosaurus to Anchisaurus is a stretch for even “day-age” theorists since the genetic differences between them are as immense as their body size differentials. This slippery use of the word “kind” has all the imprecision of a god-of-the-gaps.

Did God say to take seven pair of each clean animal? My Bible reads “two of each kind” in Genesis 6.19. But wait, the story changes in Genesis 7.3. Could it be that we have two separate sources (or “kinds”) here? My commenter does not inform me where the fresh-water fish came from; after God blew the water out of the cosmic dome (Genesis 8.1) they must have had time to evolve while the salt leeched out of the low-lying basins left behind by the flood and its marvelous geography-forming power. Good thing Noah had plenty of fresh water on the ark!

“Take time to consider what scientists have already said on the issue,” my debate partner adjures me. That’s just the problem, however. I do read what the scientists say. And all of them who write without a Genesis bias tell me that the ark story is not scientifically feasible. More than that, being a life-long Bible reader, I came to that conclusion as well, based on the genre of the story (myth). I never claim to be the first to find contradictions that prove problematic for the Bible – I simply try to make my readers consider the implications of the fact that such contradictions indeed exist.

What I find so interesting about such criticism is that the author of the comment has not tested his/her hypothesis about what I actually believe. On principle I do not share my personal religious beliefs on my blog, just as I do not share them in the classroom. What I believe is immaterial to the issue of Creationism; in this issue the facts speak for themselves. The fact is “Creation Science” is science fiction.

Naughty Religion is Bad Science

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In the continual struggle of Fundamentalist Christianity against the rest of the world, new Creationist grounds have been made in Connecticut. Connecticut is not exactly the first state to spring to mind when it comes to extremist conservative religion, but Fundamentalism knows no bounds. Perhaps the largest disappointment, from the point of view of a student of religion who knows the Fundamentalists a little too well, is that otherwise intelligent people simply accept what their clergy tell them. Having been a seminary student and professor, however, I know the kinds of training clergy receive and if the whole wide world knew things would be different.

Clergy of all stripes of all denominations of all religions are just as human as the rest of us. They do not have special physiognomic features in their brains or hearts or cellular structures that allow them to receive private messages from God/the gods. Many are trained in special schools where people like myself teach them, often against the blustering of their clergy supporters back home, what we factually know about the Bible and other aspects of religion. Many successfully block out what they are forced to hear and emerge just as ossified, if not more so, as when they entered. In other words, their “education” has been an exercise in learning to ignore the truth. They are then made into clergy who continue the deception. Even worse are the clergy who receive no training at all, frequently fresh from an overly-heavy-dinner-induced religious experience, who claim that the biological responses to overtaxed gastric juices is some message from beyond.

The average citizen naively accepts the religious credentials of their clergy, supposing that this “holy” person has had some special word from on high. That word is often factually wrong, especially concerning evolution and the origins of life, but it is accepted as gospel truth and disseminated among unsuspecting children. Religion is a matter of belief, not of fact. As America lags farther and farther behind even developing nations in science education, Fundamentalist clergy give a self-satisfied smile. They have become the gods of a nation that was once able to land some of its citizens on the silvery moon in that great literal dome that surrounds our flat earth.

Emasculating Science Education

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American lags behind. Tough words to read, n’est-ce pas? America lags behind in science education. Even nations as “conservative” as Tajikistan teach evolution in their classrooms without question while the United States just can’t seem to accept the facts. The fault, with no question whatsoever, lies with a very narrow Christian interpretation of the irreconcilably contradictory creation stories that open the book of Genesis. This fact has once again come to an ugly head in New Jersey, among the bluest of states. Our, gulp, Republican governor has recently nominated Bret Schundler, a supporter of school’s rights to teach intelligent design, as state commissioner of education. I shudder.

As I teach classroom after classroom of Rutgers students, there is neither biblical nor scientific basis for Creationism. Creationism is a neo-Christian chimera forged together by political pundits who believe that if evolution is stopped in its factual tracks, America will revert automatically to the pre-hippie days of the 1950s where authoritarian dads with conservative haircuts barked out the family marching orders and saw everyone to gospel-hymn-singing churches each and every Sunday. It is a myth, they assert, that is worth believing.

The problem is that facts don’t evaporate simply because nabobs don’t like them. At the FIRST Robotics competition I attended this weekend, facts were presented. The facts are that America has fallen far behind in science education. Decades of fighting the pointless battle of Creationism at the highest political level in this country have weakened us. Those who study the Bible seriously do not question evolution. Those who study science at all cannot seriously question it. Those who do dig trenches of doubt in the minds of generations of Americans with an already inadequate understanding of science and suggest that maybe there is reason to find an atheistic plot behind evolution. There is no plot, only facts. And if New Jersey is about to join the Kansases, Arkansases, and Texases that see big cars, big oil, and big daddies as the solution to our social ills, it may be time to move to New Hampshire.

Religion Embraces Science

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My colleague and one-time dean, Michael Zimmerman of Butler University, has brought his Clergy Letter Project to the Huffington Post. Well, he has written an online piece for the Huffington Post entitled “Redefining the Creation/Evolution Controversy.” His article is clear and to-the-point: the Creation/Evolution debate is not about religion versus science. That has been shown repeatedly for those who care to examine the history of this controversy. Evolution barely caused a ripple among clergy when it was first becoming popular among scientists. Ministers assumed it was just one of God’s mysteries and went about their clerical duties. The issue became a public relations boondoggle with the Scopes Trial of 1925. One of the best books written on that subject is Edward Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods.

As I have stated in my podcast on this issue, Creationism is a splinter movement within Evangelical Christianity. Over the years it has drawn in members of a wide variety of Christian groups, including Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestant denominations. It has publicized its concerns so well that many people assume that this is the “Christian” viewpoint and that all other views are, by definition, non-Christian. This is the perspective that has driven a wedge between religion and science, creating a false front that has led to many confrontations between Evangelicals and scientists. My favorite history of the Creationist movement is Ronald Numbers’ The Creationists.

The true motivation of the movement is, without doubt, political. While many sophisticated people scoff at the apparently simplistic machinations of the Creationist movement, what they do not realize is that it is a highly organized and politically savvy alliance of special-interest groups. Robert Pennock’s Tower of Babel was an academic exposé of the inner workings of the Creationist movement. It is perhaps the most important book written on the subject. Published by an academic press, however, it has not found the wide public readership it deserves.

Do yourself a favor: read Dr. Zimmerman’s post. I believe he has framed the dilemma in the correct way: the struggle is one within a specific religion, Christianity, not one between religion and science. The more the public knows about this issue the better off we all will be in the long run.

Childhood Never Ends

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Yesterday’s 8.8 earthquake in Chile has people asking once again what has angered the almighty. Guilt, unassuaged by human suffering, accompanies natural disasters around the world. This perspective is nothing new, but rather an inherited burden from our cultural forebears who believed gods to be perpetually vindictive or indifferent to people, and who would strike out without warning. One of Poseidon’s favored titles in Homer is “earth-shaker.” When something as stable as the very planet rocks, the gods must be angry.

Psychologists have long delved into the all-too-human reaction of guilt to momentous occasions. Guilt is also generally recognized as a universal human emotion, occasionally supposed to be in evidence among the great apes. Perhaps our primate progenitors were born with an innate sense of having wronged the powers that be, for like children we still cry out for deliverance from blizzards, hurricanes, wild fires, volcanoes and earthquakes. No matter how much we grow up, we never outgrow our sense of having angered that great parent in the sky.

Science has revealed to us a natural world with physical causes. We know that massive plates of the earth’s crust rub past each other as they float on a hellish, viscous ocean of molten rock. We know that incredible stresses and pressures find release in the freeing jolts of earthquakes. This we know, but we find the concept more frightening that we are the victims of nature than the fantasy that we are victims of God. Better to put a human face, albeit an angry one, on natural disasters since we may at least beg for mercy.

There is no divine “why” to such disasters. Even the Bible affirms that things just happen sometimes with no divine intentionality. As this artificial world we constructed shivers from natural forces we are led by natural feelings to irrational conclusions that empower us. We are children looking for an absent parent. And Poseidon, it seems, evaporated long ago.

Never trust a god with a fork!

Eine Kleine Neanderthal-Musik

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I suffer a limited form of amusia. No, it’s not a fear of amusement, but rather lack of musical ability. I appreciate music very deeply, but I simply can’t make it. I’ve tried lessons and teachers end up turning away in exasperation. The embarrassing part about all this is that music is an integral part of religion – almost all forms of religion have their musical repertoire, and musicologists have demonstrated that the early human impulse to make music has a religious basis. I can only sit in the audience.

That's me on the left

I’m finally getting around to reading Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. A few years back I gave an academic paper suggesting that musical development could be an analog to religious development on a neurological level in the Bronze Age. Since I’m not a neuroscientist I have to rely on others to do the experimental side of the equation. Mithen serves this function nicely. When I read about music and the brain, which I do frequently, I am surprised that more scholars of religion haven’t picked up on this connection. Since music is frequently “background noise” today, many people casually assume that it is insubstantial, a whim. I look at it (listen to it) from a different angle. I seldom listen to background music – if music is playing, I pay attention to it, and something in my unprofessional brain says Mithen is often right on target.

Of course, religion and music is not the main thrust of The Singing Neanderthals, but rather the idea that music was formative for human cognition. Perhaps music even developed before speech. For me this is an important piece of a much larger puzzle: whence did religion arise? Like all inquiries that delve too deeply into the past, the answer is lost among ambiguous artifacts and ancient dust. And yet, those who know more about this than I do seem to be pointing in the direction that both religion and music have their origins in the pre-Homo sapiens stage of our evolution. I’m not surprised. I only wish I could play along.

Klaatu Barada Nikto

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I grew up with robots. Of course they were on the television screen and I was far away in rural-ish western Pennsylvania. They were exotic creatures built by guys much more intelligent than I could ever hope to be, and they were powerful, completely rational, and scary. Now I find myself involved with the FIRST Robotics team in my daughter’s high school where kids a third my age are building a robot. It is a humbling experience.

The more I ponder my small support role in the construction of a robotic creature, the more my thoughts turn to George Dyson’s masterful science writing in one of my favorite books — Darwin Among the Machines: the Evolution of Global Intelligence. I would not have known of this brilliant book had I not met George and a group of his friends several years back while they were discussing some of the ideas raised in his work. The main one that captured my attention was the premise that when we build machines we may be constructing an unrecognized form of consciousness. The greatest minds in neuroscience today cannot agree on what consciousness really is or how far it extends beyond this “three-pound universe” in our heads. Although most would decline to comment on the overtly religious term “soul,” we still know that any difference between consciousness, mind, psyche, and soul is very slim indeed.

Read this book!

Our lifestyle is made possible by robots. We drive cars largely constructed by them, use their chips to communicate over vast distances, and even take a stroll on the surface of Mars with them. My question from Monday’s post may have been whimsical, but it was serious. Where is it that the essence of a creature resides? Does it require carbon-based biology, or do we, unwittingly, create a race of slaves just like the gods of old?

Out of Reach

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Last weekend I had hoped to see the movie Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin. This is a movie that has had trouble in the United States since distribution companies felt it would be too controversial for American audiences. Believing that evolution is still a taboo topic in the most “advanced” nation on the planet is a peculiar conundrum. Why are we so sensitive concerning our natural pedigree?

Primatologists are constantly discovering new and unexpected connections between the great apes and homo sapiens. We share biological, and as we are increasingly aware, cerebral traits. Empathy and xenophobia, two features once believed unique to humans, are in evidence among our great ape cousins. We are on a continuum rather than a segmented train.

Bearing these provocative thoughts in mind, I was ready to head out to the theater, even if I had to go alone, to see the story of Darwin. I’ve read enough biographies to know there are some heart-rending moments in the story, situations that I would not be able to face – but it is a story of truth. It is ironic that we sometimes fear the truth, since religion is our effort to find exactly that. So, resolve firmly in hand, I searched for New Jersey theaters showing the film. None. The nearest show was in Midtown Manhattan. Add a twenty-dollar train ticket to the cost of admission, and to an underemployed academic the price was out of reach. Perhaps some day the movie will become available for general public consumption. Until it does, however, I’ll just have to lament my frustration to a local empathetic ape.

A scene from the movie, so I'm told

Missing Links

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Dinosaurs hold a fascination like few other creatures. Perhaps it is because of their exotic and tragic rise to dominance and their meteoric plummet to obscurity. Maybe it is because of their impossibly creative adaptations to their environment leading to frills, fans, and pointy bits in unexpected places. It might even be that they reveal our own future to us. Whatever the reason, dinosaurs still rule.

In the news yesterday, a man was arrested for stealing a dinosaur. Not a Jurassic Park living model, but a fossil excavated from private land in Montana. A few years back I took my family on a dinosaur-based trip to the west. Trundling across the endlessly flat eastern half of Wyoming, I insisted that we turn down a rutted and washed out dirt road to an obscure site where dinosaur footprints had recently been discovered. Rolling into Red Gulch (seriously!), we were, surprisingly, not the only people there. Staring down at my feet next to the fossilized prints of some ancient carnivore was like feeling the very pulse of evolution. There was no fear of divine retribution here, just a sense of tangible continuity with a long and very distant relative on the tree of life. Creationists insist that dinosaurs and other creatures were each separately created, fearing, I suppose, an interspecies miscegenation, in keeping with their overall fear of sexuality. I was envisioning myself shaking claws with cousin dilophosaurus.

There be monsters here

Over the years we’ve made many dinosaur trips, stopping at dinosaur museums in North and South Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. Once, at Makoshika State Park in Montana, where you can walk along and see dinosaur fossils in situ, we heard a couple exclaim to the flustered park ranger, “but how can that be when the world is only 6000 years old?” Dinosaurs are symbols. They represent the ultimate in stature and environmental dominance, while at the same time hosting brains that struggled to rival a humble grapefruit. As I read the other, more serious, headlines I realize how much we are like our very distant cousins.

Eager for Eden

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In a recent email from the Clergy Letter Project, Michael Zimmerman reports that the movie Creation is shortly scheduled to be released in the United States. To quote from the Project newsletter:

“You may have heard that the film, Creation, about Charles Darwin and his struggle with his faith after his daughter, Annie, died had trouble finding a US distributor because it was seen as being too controversial for the American public, particularly after being attacked on Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a supposedly ‘Christian perspective’.”

It is disturbing that a non-fiction film has been blocked from American viewers because distributors found the content too controversial. The controversy has nothing to do with sex or violence, but an assault on the fantasy of a literal interpretation of Genesis. Disturbing fact challenges comfortable fantasy.

In a related story, an article on CNN.com explores the sense of depression that several viewers of Avatar felt after the movie ended. While the reasons are deep and complex, the overall theme seems to be that these viewers can’t shake the image of a pristine world that seemed so real for two-and-a-half hours. They long for a paradise that doesn’t exist. A paradise that has never existed. I am not unsympathetic. Although I could not view the film, I left from the theater with a similar, if less intense, feeling. It is a similar emotion to that when a truly special event takes place and the mind plays it over and over like a new and significant song. Impressions and hazy images and euphoria wash over you, and a longing for a moment that can never be recaptured consumes your consciousness. These are some of the most bittersweet moments of life. They are the very heartbeat of fantasy.

There never was an Eden. Human existence has been brutal and harsh since we first stood upright and wondered why we could think. America is a nation in deep denial about this harsh reality. We would rather believe the biblical Eden is a literal paradise and that our aching imaginations are somehow giving us glimpses of a fabled utopia where life was perfect. Well, almost perfect. The movie Avatar presents a paradigm that many Americans can relate to: an electronic world of endless possibilities shielding us from the stark realities of illness, pollution, tragedy, and death. We are insulated in our surreal environment that we have created for ourselves.

The human capacity for wonder is perhaps the greatest asset that consciousness has deigned to bequeath us. We can imagine a world where all creatures live in harmony with their environment and love and peace flourish. But that is not our world. A good corrective to these tempting fantasies is to read some good old classic Greek tragedies. These imaginative explorations of the human condition are as true to life as dreams of utopian worlds are removed from it. It is all a matter of perspective. And the Greeks were writing B.C.E. — Before the Computer Era — when reality had not been hidden behind a haze of ephemeral electrons.

Birds of a Fang Suck Together

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It reads like a cross between a Hitchcock movie and a Lovecraft story — paleontologists have unearthed a fanged bird fossil from the Cretaceous Era. Despite the cartoonish images this news flashes into my head, the startling find also suggests that this turkey-sized predator was also venomous. The first known ancestor to the avian family that used poison to immobilize its victims. A venomous bird.

Don’t let the cherubic Sinornithosaurus fool you! (From Wiki Commons)

Martin Luther is rumored to have said that you can’t prevent birds from flying over your head, (but you can prevent them from nesting in your hair). This new discovery suggests that there might be poisonous birds hovering around out there. And of course, Creationists must make room on the ark for this extraordinary creature. Since all critters, according to Genesis, were on the ark, our Sinornithosaurus must have lurked in some dark corner. I wonder how old Noah classified them — were they nestled among the birds or were they roaming about in the dinosaur wing? These toothy pterosaur wannabes were closely related to the velociraptors and microraptors that once served as the tetrapod mosquitoes of the Cretaceous Park world, stealth biters who’d glide down upon you undetected. The Creationists railing against transitional forms are scratching their theologically inclined heads.

I welcome the discovery like an early holiday gift. Although no one will ever see a living poisonous reptilian turkey soaring down from a Cretaceous canopy, we can all wonder and imagine. Fangs bared, venom dripping, it drops into our comfortable world and makes us reconsider. Apparently poisonous birds did not make the evolutionary cut, but I, for one, will be keeping a closer eye on the sky when I’m out in the woods or jogging around town early in the morning.

What Would Dinos Eat?

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A recent edition of Science Illustrated ran an article about a potentially revolutionary understanding of mammalian evolution. Reponomamus robustus, a large mammal from the Cretaceous Era has been found with dinosaur bones in its stomach. The implication, of course, is that this early mammal may have eaten dinosaurs instead of the conventional reverse of the scenario. Science is open to such radical ideas, but my thoughts turned to the culture war being waged on automobile bumpers across the United States.

Several years ago the Jesus Fish or ichthus symbol began appearing on the backend of cars in what seemed at first to be a “baby on board” tactic with a don’t-ram-me-I’m-a-Christian subtext. Some drivers, however, associated the Jesus Fish with an evangelical power play, a showing of numbers that indicted all other drivers as “non-Christian,” and therefore, by implication, accident-worthy. The Darwin Fish showed up soon thereafter, a counter-symbol for those who seemed to be declaring that Christians could be evolutionists as well. Sensing a challenge — which always appears as a threat in neo-con eyes — the Jesus Fish or Truth Ichthus swallowing the Darwin Fish swam onto car posteriors. Then the dinosaur eating a Jesus Fish came out, and I am certain that I once saw a Jesus Fish eating a T-rex on some oversized vehicle hind-end.

A friend once asked me why I spent my time arguing with those who are so obviously wrong (the anti-evolutionists). The unfortunate answer showed up in the White House at the turn of the millennium and the radical restructuring of society encouraged by the “religious right” gains credibility from the sheer number of people willing to adorn their cars with Jesus Fish. The real victim in this volley of statements in chrome is a guy who said nothing about evolution and who, I’m sure, would be amazed at how misrepresented he is. As the love-hate relationship between Jesus and dinosaurs continues to wax and wane, I’m staying out of it, but I’m more frightened by the fish than by the dinosaur.

Make Room on the Ark — Another New Dinosaur!

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Enter Aardonyx celestae! A new dinosaur announced yesterday in South Africa is being hailed as a missing link in the sauropod chain of development, much to the chagrin of Creationists. I have to admit that I never outgrew my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, and when we purchased the life-like models for my daughter as she was growing up I secretly coveted them for myself. The rate of discovery among new genera of dinosaurs is between 10 and 20 per year, meaning that the maybe 20 different dinosaur types I knew as a kid has ballooned into well over 500 different species and 1,800 genera. Late at night I still hear the call of paleontology and I slip Jurassic Park into the DVD player and weep.

With each new dinosaur discovered Noah’s ark must evolve into a larger boat for some among the Creationist camp. After all Genesis says “two of every kind” lumbered aboard. The newbie this time is a proto-sauropod, a missing link between bi-pedal herbivores and their earth-shaking descendants who required four tree-like legs to support their immense weight. It seems that Noah must have been quite the engineer to handle all this displacement. And it is a good thing too — scientists predict that the new genera to be discovered represent only about 30 percent of the total, and the number will likely continue to climb for a century and a half yet.

Dinos

Wikipedia proto-sauropods race for the top deck

So it seems that the God-of-the-gaps grows smaller while the ark grows larger. Of course, the dinosaurs might have evolved into all these different genera over time, but then, Creationists can’t allow for that, since it would admit room for evolution. And that seems about as likely as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints backing anti-discrimination laws against homosexuals!